FEATURE 122 piece came to me without a stand. It is a vertical piece with a pig’s head, a bird, and a fish. I placed it horizontally on a chest in the living room and even horizontally it is still marvelous. It is closed and open—linear and solid. And, looking at it, it has so much presence it gives me a standard to strive to attain in my own work”21 (fig. 27). Many museums across the world have collections of art from the Bismarck Archipelago, acquired either in the early contact period of the nineteenth century or later by gift or purchase in the secondary marketplace. The Brighton Museum in England, however, has a collection of about thirty objects that not only encompasses pieces from the very earliest moments of contact in the 1880s, but also has pieces that were made throughout the twentieth century. Their famous big-mouth fish malangan, one of a number of such works made in or near the village of Madina in about 1925, was given to them in 1931 (fig. 28). In 1985 they then acquired a tatanua mask by Lanngiri Urban of Langania and, more recently, a contemporary version of their big-mouth fish by the artist Michael Homerang. The museum’s interest in Bismarck Archipelago sculpture as an important component of world art heritage dates back to the 1940s, when they were intimately involved in the seminal exhibition, 40,000 Years of Modern Art, A Comparison of Primitive and Modern, held in London in the winter of 1948 and 1949. Following a scant decade after Robert Goldwater wrote his classic Primitivism in Modern Art, this groundbreaking exhibition, which included Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon among other important works, was the very first formal exploration of the relations between what was then contemporary European art and the art of non-Western peoples. Brighton lent seventeen Oceanic artworks to the exhibition including eight from New Ireland and New Britain, several of which were published in the accompanying catalog. The authors noted that a fundamental characteristic of New Ireland art, the cutting away of large areas of the outer wall of the column to form a kind of cage for an elaborately carved central core, was a carving convention that became a central motif in contemporary sculpture.22 Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, and Jacques Lipchitz were analyzed in this context, and Henry Moore’s remarkable Helmet was illustrated as the most brilliant exploitation of the New Ireland notion of enclosed form. As always, the museum promoted their New Ireland collection as an expression of artistic human endeavor, rather than ethnography, and has also used its collection as a tool to educate the local community. The Bolxuaam fish sculpture by Michael Homerang was acquired specifically for display in their recent 2012 reinstallation of their collection called, World Stories: Young Voices. The installation was conceived for people around fourteen to twenty-five years of age and was developed with many different groups of young people. With members of Art in Mind, a Brightonbased group that supports youngsters with mental health issues, a special project called “Making Malangan” was created in which participants made their own malangan sculpture, which is also on view in the museum. These arts live on today, not only in the places of their ancestral creations, living in ceremonies and dance, but in the minds and visions of those who experience it from a distance. They remain relevant for their inheritors and, with the dispersion of the art to all points of the globe, will inspire future generations as they have enriched the past. This article is a special preview of the forthcoming book Bismarck Archipelago Art, to be released by 5 Continents Editions in October 2013. The book presents around 200 important artworks, many never before published, from New Ireland, New Britain, The Admiralty, and Western Islands, featuring text by Dr. Ingrid Heermann, Klaus- Jochen Krüger, Kevin Conru, and Bart van Bussel. Art photography was done by Hughes Dubois. The Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam will host an exhibition of all the published works, opening November 7, 2013. FIG. 27: Dance mask. Northern New Ireland. Wood, pigment, shell. H: 106 cm. Sir Anthony Caro Collection, London. Photo © Anne Deknock.
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